I just cancelled my turkey and hog hunt. Called my friend who owns the ranch and both decided not going was for best. I don't have to pay so no money issues. I had the truck loaded, just needed gas and ice, not fun unloading.I'm traveling from the Phoenix area so I'm have to stop overnight and get gas three times each way. We will see how the virus plays out, turkey runs through May 17 so maybe. If later just hogs is good too.

We are at a current rate of over 30,000 new cases daily and losing 1000 fellow Americans per day. On that growth curve, we will hit 100,000 new cases and 3,000 deaths per week. And that's assuming the growth rate stabilizes and doesn't keep increasing. It's beyond obvious that this isn't a hoax and just "hype". We are way beyond cancelled hunts as well.

We are outdoorsmen and pretty much consider ourselves as “tough guys”. If I had my own acreage, I could hunker down there with the Mrs and live off of wild pork, rabbits, etc. Heck, I consider rattlesnakes as definitely being on the menu as well. But don’t fool yourself. Many of you have probably never seen this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TctLr_gwP0c. He is a registered nurse and as you can see, he is in A LOT better shape than most of us and it nearly killed him. It’s crazy how differently it affects different people.

There’s another video that most of you probably have seen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwbreTp4kI8. Poor guy was just doing his job but died because of someone else’s carelessness. I am basically “an old fart” with diabetes. I am cautious because I am at higher risk and I might not be tougher than that virus.. I only go out to get our prescriptions and groceries and take the recommended precautions. A fellow THFer stated “I am not worried about it. It’s OK to be afraid, but it’s not OK to be a coward.” I’m really not sure what he meant about being a coward….I am not a coward because I am hunkering down at home. I am assuming he means that those in essential jobs, such as in the medical field (doctors, nurses, EMTs, etc.) and all those that still go out so that the rest of us have what we need, anything from deliveries to garbage collection....they are showing real bravery. Those folks are to be commended. The rest of us need to do our part by staying at home. The virus doesn’t move on its own. It moves because PEOPLE move!

No prayer in school....What's next, no thinking in church?It's not just about pie in the sky when you die. It's also about steak on your plate while you wait!

The flu kills approx. 30k Americans every year. Why are we not in quarantine every flu season?

Because it has a mortality rate of .01%. And it has a SUBSTANTIALLY lower hospitalization rate almost nobody who gets the flu has to go the hospital. The quarantine is to allow the hospitals to keep up, not necessarily to keep you from getting it.

Last edited by Tff caribou; 04/05/2010:04 PM.

The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil interference. -George Washington

The flu kills approx. 30k Americans every year. Why are we not in quarantine every flu season?

Because it has a mortality rate of .01%. And it has a SUBSTANTIALLY lower hospitalization rate almost nobody who gets the flu has to go the hospital. The quarantine is to allow the hospitals to keep up, not necessarily to keep you from getting it.

Trophy ---apples vs oranges. I am not an MD, but from what I can tell, it's because regular flu doesn't spread as fast or as unabated as COVID 19 does. You can have it and not know it and be spreading it to family, friends, and even strangers. Without all the stay-at-home orders, we would have a lot more major cities and regions that would be as bad or worse than New York right now. We are on the same trajectory as Italy....no bueno. Plus, we have treatments and vaccines for flu but nothing for COVID 19, so we are fighting it blindfolded.

It's hard to figure out even an approximate death rate because of the lack of data, but this corona virus appears to be more deadly than the flu. The number you cite is spread out over a year. The first US COVID 19 death was on Feb. 28. Two weeks later on March 14, we were only at 10 deaths....no big deal, right? One week later, March 21 we were at 73....fire was just getting started. March 28 = 480 deaths, so we were still under 500 in the span of one month. 8 days later (today, April 5), we are closing in on 9600 and losing over 1000 per day. That's what EXPONENTIAL GROWTH will do. I don't have the stats, but I doubt if we ever lost 1000 people per day for several days in a row due to the regular flu (and we are just getting started at that 1000 per day rate). When did the regular flu ever exhibit this COVID 19 pattern? IT NEVER HAS, thus apples vs oranges!! I pray I am wrong, but if it continues at this pace or higher, we will hit 30,000 deaths a week before the end of April with Lord knows how many more after that.

Right now we would be in much worse shape if some state and city leaders had not acted on their own and showed real leadership by forcing people to stay home (that's the only proven way to slow it down that we have right now). Look at what is happening in New Orleans because they went ahead and had Mardi Gras. What if Austin had not cancelled South By Southwest or if Houston had not cancelled the stock show and rodeo? So please don't downplay this with flu comparison like Trump did. Like I said, apples vs oranges.

Last edited by Ag Hunter 78; 04/05/2010:44 PM.

No prayer in school....What's next, no thinking in church?It's not just about pie in the sky when you die. It's also about steak on your plate while you wait!

Land owner of 60k acres called and told me it was best I don’t come out for my scheduled turkey hunt. This was diy camping/hunting on a family friend’s land with no contact with anyone. Guess he thought I’d infect the bushes.

I am a physician and can comment on what we are seeing at my hospital. We haven’t seen the exponential growth to the 4th power (yet) as Ag hunter has described, but many places are. We have 28 positive case, and 1 death. But we have been doubling our numbers every 6-7 days. Many reasons can be the cause of that, lack of adequate numbers of testing kits, and delays in getting results to name a few. We are currently doing around 30+ tests a day in a community of about 200,000 people. Results are taking 24-48 hours to populate, and this is just a recent improvement as before it was taking 4-6 days. Sensitivity of the test has been questioned (reported around 70%) with about a 30% false negative rate. We ran our own controlled trial on a group of “symptomatic patients”, who all had initial negative test results by re-testing them. Repeated exams were negative as well. So it appears the test kits we are using are fairly sensitive. We currently have two entire floors of the hospital quarantined off with “symptomatic patients”. The numbers vary daily as people come off of quarantine or get added to it based on symptoms, time frame of symptoms and test results. Several are healthy enough to quarantine at home though they are positive. Each case is different. So yes, our hospital like many others ARE being affected and are actively caring for these patients. Are we currently overrun, no, but we have contingency plans for the progression when it occurs. Projection models done by the state health department have our case numbers peaking Mid-Late May. Yes, these are projections. It all depends on each of us, and doing our part to prevent the spread. But it is here in Texas, and it will get worse as we have not peaked yet. How much worse, I don’t know. Do I agree with how “politically” this has been handled, no. Lots of things could have been done earlier on and nation wide mandates would have gotten everyone on the same page at the same time. But I won’t get in to that. It’s easy to say, “would have, could have, should have”. Too late for that now. What I will say, is we have an advantage of being in the Central US and the virus is essentially migrating from the East and West coats inwards towards us. Though we may not have seen the peak yet, it has allowed us time to better prepare than what has occurred in these coastal cities. It’s kind of like sitting on a beach when the hotel staff comes out and tells you to evacuate because a hurricanes predicted path is headed for you in the coming 48-72 hours. You sit, looking out into the ocean and see nothing but blue skies. It will come, it will come. That being said, there is ZERO reason to live in fear. It does no good. Simply be prepared and mindful of what you can do as a citizen to stop and or slow the spread. Should we put our lives on hold, and suffer the economic downfall this is causing to save lives ....... tough question to answer. I agree we need to get back to normalcy, but doing so too soon, may spell disaster. I don’t have the answers and am no expert. Just actually living the reality. If nothing else, I hope the models are wrong and we recover quicker that predicted. Further more I hope each and everyone of you can weather the storm. And lastly, may we not forgot the effect this has had on us all, and learn from it, and teach our youth to plan better financially in the future, so they don’t struggle economically like so many of us are currently. Stay safe.

Thanks Ring. Always very good to hear from someone with some actual real-life informed info. Very well said. May do some good to repost your comments on one of many of the Virus threads in the Off Topic section.

Howdy Buzz. Mea culpa. It was me more than anyone else that derailed the thread. But it bothered me that people just weren't taking this seriously.

I think some still don't understand the implications of exponential growth that is left UNABATED. A real good example would be the following: Given the choice, would you take $10 million or what you would have on the last day of the month if you got a penny the first day and it doubled every day? Most would jump and take the $10 million. If you crunch the numbers, on day 7 you would be at a whopping $.64! This is very synonymous to what happens in a pandemic that spreads exponentially. The numbers at first are very small, so no big deal....lulls us into a false sense of security. Back to the money, on day 14 of the month, you would be at $8,192.....not bad but a long way from $10 million. In a pandemic context, still no big deal at this point. Fast forward to day 21, and guess what? You are at $1,048,576. Oh wow, we are getting into some coin now. And if this was a pandemic situation...hey, this is getting serious. You are now where the numbers are exploding. Guess what? On day 30, you would be at $536,870,912! And that's on a 30-day month. Double that for the 31st day and you would be at $1,073,741,824. You made a terrible choice on the money if you chose $10 million. Some politicians must not understand exponential growth either. The administration of the the most advanced and richest country on earth ignored COVID 19 for two months, so we now have the most cases in the world by far even though we had plenty of advanced warning to take action instead of downplaying it.

States and cities are on their own. I already mentioned in a previous post about what is happening in New Orleans (they went ahead and had Mardi Gras), compared to Austin canceling South By Southwest and Houston canceling the stock show and rodeo. We'd be in much worse shape, but thank goodness we have local leaders with brains and balls. Yea, things in Texas aren't that bad. We are lucky and it's easy for some to ignore or downplay this COVID 19 thing. But I figure many Texans would sing a much different tune if they lived in New York or New Jersey.

Within each state there's also a breakdown by county. Anyway, it can be pretty depressing to see those numbers because they aren't numbers. Each of those is a fellow American who is a son or daughter, father or mother, brother or sister, grandma or grandpa, niece or nephew, cousin, etc. Each of them has family and friends that are also impacted. To make it all even worse, those that end up hospitalized can't have any visitors, so they have to go through it alone. But yes, this is America and we have all types of freedom. That includes the freedom to downplay this.....just don't let that "downplaying" result in not taking precautions and catching the virus because even if you come out it OK, those you pass it on to might not.

No prayer in school....What's next, no thinking in church?It's not just about pie in the sky when you die. It's also about steak on your plate while you wait!

....in watching all the talking heads of any cable channel since we have become home bound when our Antique Furniture and Decor Store bizznizz was closed in early March, I've come to accept a few things as being more than likely how this deal is gonna go down before the Presidential elections next November, or mebbe just past the next few weeks until after Labor Day.

1. I understand that the Virus is not 'posed to be hyper active in hot dry weather and will begin to recede during the summer months from the change in weather. 2. Folks will get tired of the Face Mask - Social Distance yadda yadda drill and begin to ignore The Rules as the lack of new ID'd victims "flattens" out. 3. The virus However Will begin to rebound in the Sept/Oct cooler weather time frame and the political finger pointing will consume 100% of the "Political Discussion" with no chance of any cooperation 'tween the Political Parties for the Common Good BEFORE & AFTER the elections .... 4. so who knows who will get elected and have to accept the Role of George Washington crossing the Delaware River, making the really HARD Decisions, and still get crucified for his efforts, like the Navy Admiral did who got fired from his position as Captain of the Roosevelt Air Craft Carrier, while trying to protect his 200++ infected sailors from dying on the ship.

We had a Texas Governor one time who coined a "memorable" phrase about one of his Female competitiors when he said if "The Bad Thing is inevitably GOING TO HAPPEN ....to just lie back and enjoy it.THAT Ain't gonna happen..so right now I'm looking for a State whose Governor is a Middle of the road Centrist Moderate Conservative, regardless of Party Affiliation, who rules for the best average results with an iron fist 'cause "yew cain't satsify everbody"....JMHO & YMMV

Hit it Willie ..."On the road Again " Allus wanted to live in the Pacific Northwest, still got a little time left on my ticket to ride, at age 75 ....have lived in Florida & Chicago and traveled all of the east coast south of Boston to Homestead & is OUTT ( umm mebbe I could make do in Maine) and so is the Midwest north of the Red River, or anywhere east of the Rockies ....

FWIW my Politics are mine and mine alone...and so are yours ...Please respect my politics as personal, as I will yours ): Read and think about the 3 Opinion statements I have lived by for more years than I can repeat as shown below. Ron

In otherwords, coronavirus probably gonna come seasonal like the flu every year. When we get burned out on hearing about it, poloticians will stop using it to gain popularity, and Lord willing we will resume life as normal.

1. I understand that the Virus is not 'posed to be hyper active in hot dry weather and will begin to recede during the summer months from the change in weather.

I had heard that too, but some have rightly pointed out that in the Southern Hemisphere where it is still hot (Australia), the virus has no problem being active. So that hoped for scenario might not play out as hoped.

Chump: WAKE UP. Exponential growth IS HAPPENING. The examples I have given are exponential growth LEFT UNABATED. If we had just buried our heads and not done anything, we would have a lot of New Yorks right now and it would keep getting worse because we have no cure for this cursed virus. Back on March 15 we only had 12 new deaths that day. On March 30 (just 2 weeks later), we had 488 new deaths. Less than 2 weeks later from that, the last two days (April 7 and 8), we have had over 1900 new deaths EACH DAY. That's not exponential enough for you?

Like I said, the social distancing is working so that the growth rate isn't anything close to doubling each day. I could break out my scientific calculator to figure out an approximate growth rate----maybe the rate is 1.3 times as many or something. I don't want to go into a big lengthy math lesson, but the key idea is that exponential growth is MULTIPLICATIVE, not ADDITIVE. Additive growth would be something like 2 more each day, not 2 times as many each day. There's a huge difference between the two situations. Additive growth doesn't explode into huge numbers. I already showed that at first, multiplicative growth seems real slow and results in us being asleep at the wheel. But once you start multiplying 4 and then 5 digit numbers, you start the explosions. Fortunately, the social distancing has disrupted the growth and we are at losing 1900 per day now (which is terrible enough) instead of 5,000 to 10,000 per day.

No prayer in school....What's next, no thinking in church?It's not just about pie in the sky when you die. It's also about steak on your plate while you wait!

I'm just going by your handle! I didn't mean to call you out or anything. But I see the news reports about what is happening in New York and what those medical folks are going through. Plus patients aren't allowed visitors. What really hits me is all the refrigerated trailers outside the hospitals that are needed for all the bodies. Pretty sobering stuff. We can't take it lightly and have it happen in our backyard.

I know that we have been really lucky so far in Texas, and I personally haven't been impacted.....no sick family members. What hasn't soaked in is that we have no idea what "normal" will look like when this finally dies down. Maybe this virus is here to stay, maybe not. I have never bothered to get a flu vaccine and I am an old fart at 67. But I think I will get the COVID 19 vaccine when it comes out! Remember how things had to change after 911? All the changes to airport security, etc., etc., etc. I guess for a lot of us on THF, I can put up with the "new normal" as long as I can go shoot and eat critters and catch and eat fish.

Last edited by Ag Hunter 78; 04/09/2009:26 PM.

No prayer in school....What's next, no thinking in church?It's not just about pie in the sky when you die. It's also about steak on your plate while you wait!